Well, 2016 has certainly been, shall we say, an “interesting” year!  Perhaps many people will be glad to the see the back of it, but somehow I’ve a feeling 2017 won’t be any less eventful.  Anyway, here’s hoping the new year brings good things to you all!

Back in my little GearBlocks corner of the world, in many ways things have progressed pretty well this year, getting through the Unity 5 hurdle was definitely a big step forward.  I’m a bit frustrated to not be further ahead with the game generally by now though.  I’ll just have to keep chipping away at it, it’ll get there eventually.  I’m very appreciative to all those of you who have played the demo, built some amazing creations, and given me really useful feedback.  It helps motivate me to keep going!

Over the past couple of months I’ve been working on a bunch of different things.  I was looking at improving the construction controls, but kinda got stuck with “designer’s / programmer’s block” if you can call it that.  So while thinking on this some more, to keep progress going I did several other smaller tasks:-

• Made a load of new parts (gears, control wheels, suspension parts, connectors and more).
• Added more user settings (e.g. mouse look sensitivity and camera FOV).
• UI tweaks.
• Rendering effects.
• Unity upgrade.
• Bug fixes.

Next week I plan on going back to the controls improvements, mustn’t procrastinate any longer!